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Friday, July 5, 2013

Today I would like to welcome Gina and Janice, the authors of THE WOLVES OF ST. PETER'S to Cozy Up With A Good Read!

Gina Buonaguro & Janice Kirk: Accidental Historical
Novelists

We fell into writing historical fiction by accident. Our
first novel, The Sidewalk Artist, was to be a contemporary travel story
where our heroine met a sidewalk artist in Paris. But what was he drawing? The
first things to pop into Janice’s head were Raphael’s iconic cherubs (from The Sistine Madonna). And boom - we had our story, and it was suddenly part
historical fiction.

We turned to complete historical fiction for our second
book, Ciao Bella, which takes place in Northern Italy in the summer
after WWII, and decided for our third novel to return to the Italian
Renaissance, which allowed us to both build upon the research we had already
started and have Raphael return as a minor character. So we began The Wolves
of St. Peter’s, which originally had no wolves but did have a painting.

During our initial research, we had become fascinated with
paintings of the Madonna and Child. Almost everyone in Renaissance Italy
lucky enough to have a roof over their head had one under said roof. So artists
- both famous and forgotten to history - churned them out, making frequent use
of prostitutes and courtesans for their Madonna models. That certainly made us
wonder. Did these women’s lives change after they were painted as the Mother of
God? Did they think differently? How did they feel about the painting? Did the
owner of the Madonna ever think about them? Did they ever meet them - or even
fall in love with them? So this idea - a prostitute as a Madonna model - gave
us our victim.

Next, we needed our detective. Writing again about Raphael
meant not only delving into the papacy of Pope Julius II but also into
Michelangelo, who was just getting started on the Sistine Chapel ceiling (and,
as we describe in Wolves, having a hell of a time with it.) From known
facts, such as conveyed in Ross King’s wonderful Michelangelo and the Pope’s
Ceiling, we discovered that in Michelangelo’s household was a houseboy
whose name was never recorded – that was the basis for our “investigator”
Francesco, whom we transformed from a boy of ten to a twenty-year-old humanist
lawyer forced to flee Florence in disgrace.

Steven Pinker’s brilliant book TheBetter Angels
of Our Nature answered a great deal for us on the general

violence at the
time as well as the nature of women’s lives, especially when it came to issues
of reproduction, the fate of unwanted babies, and the casual approach to
infanticide. That helped us shape Francesco’s lover, Susanna.

From reading Benvenuto Cellini – a contemporary and whose
version of events should be taken with a grain of salt – we gained another
vantage point on the era. For instance, everyone carried a dagger and thought
nothing of using it. Cellini even wrote an account of raising the dead with a necromancer
(to be taken with a bucket of salt), which inspired the scene where the
skeptical Francesco takes Susanna to see a necromancer at the Coliseum. Janice
saw this as a perfect opportunity to prove Gina wrong when she offhandly
remarked that we would never write about zombies!

Peter Partner’s Renaissance Rome also gave us a good
image of Rome at the time, a cobbled-together, ramshackle series of structures
that blurred the idea of inside and outside, where one morning a homeowner
might wake up and not be able to use his front door because someone had built a
cowshed against it (at which point no doubt the daggers would come out).

Sometimes key details were quite serendipitously discovered.
The actual starving wolves that descend from the hills and terrify the Romans
came from a Google search. While Janice was hoping to learn more about Romulus
and Remus, the mythical founding fathers of Rome who had been raised by wolves,
she instead came across a New York Times article from the early 1900s
that said starving wolves had entered Rome after a harsh winter. Much later, we
came across another account of this happening in the 16th century.
Finally - our wolves! And from that also came our title, which alludes to
wolves both real and metaphorical.

As a rule, we avoided reading other historical novels from
our time period and setting, since we didn’t want to unconsciously absorb other
people’s stories. Still, other works had their influences, often from
unexpected places, and Wolves does owe something to Polanski’s Chinatown
– “This is Rome, Francesco.”

From all this research, we then built our story. The key was
to fully absorb our findings so that when we sat down to write, we entered and
lived in our characters’ world, so that the world was described fully from
their point of view rather than ours. We also wanted the story to emerge from
the specific setting and period, not just plop a plot into any old historical
milieu.

It helped too that we’ve both been to Rome. Unless you’ve
stood in the Coliseum, it is hard to fully appreciate its size. The same with
the splendor of the Vatican, St. Peter’s Basilica, and Michelangelo’s ceiling.
We could envision the world through our characters’ eyes, from how long it took
to walk from here to there to what they would have seen along the way (although
it’s true that Rome has changed a lot in 500 years – the square where
Michelangelo had his workshop was long ago consumed by St. Peter’s Square). Our
next novel takes Francesco to Venice, and having spent time there this past
winter will allow us to enrich that story’s setting and backdrop, too.

So, although we started out as accidental historical
novelists, we are now quite deliberate about it. We greatly enjoy writing
novels set in the past, based upon real events, and supported by intensive
research - and that’s what we plan to do for a long time to come.

Disclosure

I am an Amazon Affiliate and Book Depository Affiliate. This means that when you click on the link and buy the book from Amazon/Book Depository I get a percentage back. This will help me to host more giveaways for you.